The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Volume VI Part 21

LETTER.[23]

My Dear sir,--Your letter is, to myself, infinitely obliging: with regard to you, I can find no fault with it, except that of a tone of humility and disqualification, which neither your rank, nor the place you are in, nor the profession you belong to, nor your very extraordinary learning and talents, will in propriety demand or perhaps admit. These dispositions will be still less proper, if you should feel them in the extent your modesty leads you to express them. You have certainly given by far too strong a proof of self-diffidence by asking the opinion of a man circ.u.mstanced as I am, on the important subject of your letter. You are far more capable of forming just conceptions upon it than I can be. However, since you are pleased to command me to lay before you my thoughts, as materials upon which your better judgment may operate, I shall obey you, and submit them, with great deference, to your melioration or rejection.

But first permit me to put myself in the right. I owe you an answer to your former letter. It did not desire one, but it deserved it. If not for an answer, it called for an acknowledgment. It was a new favor; and, indeed, I should be worse than insensible, if I did not consider the honors you have heaped upon me with no sparing hand with becoming grat.i.tude. But your letter arrived to me at a time when the closing of my long and last business in life, a business extremely complex, and full of difficulties and vexations of all sorts, occupied me in a manner which those who have not seen the interior as well as exterior of it cannot easily imagine. I confess that in the crisis of that rude conflict I neglected many things that well deserved my best attention,--none that deserved it better, or have caused me more regret in the neglect, than your letter. The instant that business was over, and the House had pa.s.sed its judgment on the conduct of the managers, I lost no time to execute what for years I had resolved on: it was, to quit my public station, and to seek that tranquillity, in my very advanced age, to which, after a very tempestuous life, I thought myself ent.i.tled. But G.o.d has thought fit (and I unfeignedly acknowledge His justice) to dispose of things otherwise. So heavy a calamity has fallen upon me as to disable me for business and to disqualify me for repose.

The existence I have I do not know that I can call life. Accordingly, I do not meddle with any one measure of government, though, for what reasons I know not, you seem to suppose me deeply in the secret of affairs. I only know, so far as your side of the water is concerned, that your present excellent Lord Lieutenant (the best man in every relation that I have ever been acquainted with) has perfectly pure intentions with regard to Ireland, and of course that he wishes cordially well to those who form the great ma.s.s of its inhabitants, and who, as they are well or ill managed, must form an important part of its strength or weakness. If with regard to that great object he has carried over any ready-made system, I a.s.sure you it is perfectly unknown to me: I am very much retired from the world, and live in much ignorance. This, I hope, will form my humble apology, if I should err in the notions I entertain of the question which is soon to become the subject of your deliberations. At the same time accept it as an apology for my neglects.

You need make no apology for your attachment to the religious description you belong to. It proves (as in you it is sincere) your attachment to the great points in which the leading divisions are agreed, when the lesser, in which they differ, are so dear to you. I shall never call any religious opinions, which appear important to serious and pious minds, things of no consideration. Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity. As long as men hold charity and justice to be essential integral parts of religion, there can be little danger from a strong attachment to particular tenets in faith. This I am perfectly sure is your case; but I am not equally sure that either zeal for the tenets of faith, or the smallest degree of charity or justice, have much influenced the gentlemen who, under pretexts of zeal, have resisted the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of their country. My dear son, who was a person of discernment, as well as clear and acute in his expressions, said, in a letter of his which I have seen, "that, in order to grace their cause, and to draw some respect to their persons, they pretend to be bigots." But here, I take it, we have not much to do with the theological tenets on the one side of the question or the other. The point itself is practically decided.

That religion is owned by the state. Except in a settled maintenance, it is protected. A great deal of the rubbish, which, as a nuisance, long obstructed the way, is removed. One impediment remained longer, as a matter to justify the proscription of the body of our country; after the rest had been abandoned as untenable ground. But the business of the Pope (that mixed person of polities and religion) has long ceased to be a bugbear: for some time past he has ceased to be even a colorable pretext. This was well known, when the Catholics of these kingdoms, for our amus.e.m.e.nt, were obliged on oath to disclaim him in his political capacity,--which implied an allowance for them to recognize him in some sort of ecclesiastical superiority. It was a compromise of the old dispute.

For my part, I confess I wish that we had been less eager in this point.

I don't think, indeed, that much mischief will happen from it, if things are otherwise properly managed. Too nice an inquisition ought not to be made into opinions that are dying away of themselves. Had we lived an hundred and fifty years ago, I should have been as earnest and anxious as anybody for this sort of abjuration; but, living at the time in which I live, and obliged to speculate forward instead of backward, I must fairly say, I could well endure the existence of every sort of collateral aid which opinion might, in the now state of things, afford to authority. I must see much more danger than in my life I have seen, or than others will venture seriously to affirm that they see, in the Pope aforesaid, (though a foreign power, and with his long tail of _et ceteras_,) before I should be active in weakening any hold which government might think it prudent to resort to, in the management of that large part of the king's subjects. I do not choose to direct all my precautions to the part where the danger does not press, and to leave myself open and unguarded where I am not only really, but visibly attacked.

My whole politics, at present, centre in one point, and to this the merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable,--that is, what will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism. What is Jacobinism? It is an attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of the persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people. For this purpose the Jacobins have resolved to destroy the whole frame and fabric of the old societies of the world, and to regenerate them after their fashion. To obtain an army for this purpose, they everywhere engage the poor by holding out to them as a bribe the spoils of the rich. This I take to be a fair description of the principles and leading maxims of the enlightened of our day who are commonly called Jacobins.

As the grand prejudice, and that which holds all the other prejudices together, the first, last, and middle object of their hostility is religion. With that they are at inexpiable war. They make no distinction of sects. A Christian, as such, is to them an enemy. What, then, is left to a real Christian, (Christian as a believer and as a statesman,) but to make a league between all the grand divisions of that name, to protect and to cherish them all, and by no means to proscribe in any manner, more or less, any member of our common party? The divisions which formerly prevailed in the Church, with all their overdone zeal, only purified and ventilated our common faith, because there was no common enemy arrayed and embattled to take advantage of their dissensions; but now nothing but inevitable ruin will be the consequence of our quarrels. I think we may dispute, rail, persecute, and provoke the Catholics out of their prejudices; but it is not in ours they will take refuge. If anything is, one more than another, out of the power of man, it is to _create_ a prejudice. Somebody has said, that a king may make a n.o.bleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.

All the princ.i.p.al religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The support that the whole or the favored parts may have in the secret dispensations of Providence it is impossible to tell; but, humanly speaking, they are all _prescriptive_ religions. They have all stood long enough to make prescription and its chain of legitimate prejudices their main stay. The people who compose the four grand divisions of Christianity have now their religion as an habit, and upon authority, and not on disputation,--as all men who have their religion derived from their parents and the fruits of education _must_ have it, however the one more than the other may be able to reconcile his faith to his own reason or to that of other men. Depend upon it, they must all be supported, or they must all fall in the crash of a common ruin. The Catholics are the far more numerous part of the Christians in your country; and how can Christianity (that is now the point in issue) be supported under the persecution, or even under the discountenance, of the greater number of Christians? It is a great truth, and which in one of the debates I stated as strongly as I could to the House of Commons in the last session, that, if the Catholic religion is destroyed by the infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd idea, that this, or any Protestant Church, can survive that event. Therefore my humble and decided opinion is, that all the three religions prevalent more or less in various parts of these islands ought all, in subordination to the legal establishments as they stand in the several countries, to be all countenanced, protected, and cherished, and that in Ireland particularly the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration, and should be, in its place, provided with all the means of making it a blessing to the people who profess it,--that it ought to be cherished as a good, (though not as the most preferable good, if a choice was now to be made,) and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. If this be my opinion as to the Catholic religion as a sect, you must see that I must be to the last degree averse to put a man, upon that account, upon a bad footing with relation to the privileges which the fundamental laws of this country give him as a subject. I am the more serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion, (always, however, as secondary,) because the serious and earnest belief and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most effectual barrier, if not the sole barrier, against Jacobinism. The Catholics form the great body of the lower ranks of your community, and no small part of those cla.s.ses of the middling that come nearest to them. You know that the seduction of that part of mankind from the principles of religion, morality, subordination, and social order is the great object of the Jacobins. Let them grow lax, skeptical, careless, and indifferent with regard to religion, and, so sure as we have an existence, it is not a zealous Anglican or Scottish Church principle, but direct Jacobinism, which will enter into that breach. Two hundred years dreadfully spent in experiments to force that people to change the form of their religion have proved fruitless. You have now your choice, for full four fifths of your people, of the Catholic religion or Jacobinism. If things appear to you to stand on this alternative, I think you will not be long in making your option.

You have made, as you naturally do, a very able a.n.a.lysis of powers, and have separated, as the things are separable, civil from political powers. You start, too, a question, whether the civil can be secured without some share in the political. For my part, as abstract questions, I should find some difficulty in an attempt to resolve them. But as applied to the state of Ireland, to the form of our commonwealth, to the parties that divide us, and to the dispositions of the leading men in those parties, I cannot hesitate to lay before you my opinion, that, whilst any kind of discouragements and disqualifications remain on the Catholics, an handle will be made by a factious power utterly to defeat the benefits of any civil rights they may apparently possess. I need not go to very remote times for my examples. It was within the course of about a twelvemonth, that, after Parliament had been led into a step quite unparalleled in its records, after they had resisted all concession, and even hearing, with an obstinacy equal to anything that could have actuated a party domination in the second or eighth of Queen Anne, after the strange adventure of the Grand Juries, and after Parliament had listened to the sovereign pleading for the emanc.i.p.ation of his subjects,--it was after all this, that such a grudging and discontent was expressed as must justly have alarmed, as it did extremely alarm, the whole of the Catholic body: and I remember but one period in my whole life (I mean the savage period between 1781 and 1767) in which they have been more harshly or contumeliously treated than since the last partial enlargement. And thus I am convinced it will be, by paroxysms, as long as any stigma remains on them, and whilst they are considered as no better than half citizens. If they are kept such for any length of time, they will be made whole Jacobins. Against this grand and dreadful evil of our time (I do not love to cheat myself or others) I do not know any solid security whatsoever; but I am quite certain that what will come nearest to it is to interest as many as you can in the present order of things, religiously, civilly, politically, by all the ties and principles by which mankind are held. This is like to be effectual policy: I am sure it is honorable policy: and it is better to fail, if fail we must, in the paths of direct and manly than of low and crooked wisdom.

As to the capacity of sitting in Parliament, after all the capacities for voting, for the army, for the navy, for the professions, for civil offices, it is a dispute _de lana caprina_, in my poor opinion,--at least on the part of those who oppose it. In the first place, this admission to office, and this exclusion from Parliament, on the principle of an exclusion from political power, is the very reverse of the principle of the English Test Act. If I were to form a judgment from experience rather than theory, I should doubt much whether the capacity for or even the possession of a seat in Parliament did really convey much of power to be properly called political. I have sat there, with some observation, for nine-and-twenty years, or thereabouts. The power of a member of Parliament is uncertain and indirect; and if power, rather than splendor and fame, were the object, I should think that any of the princ.i.p.al clerks in office, to say nothing of their superiors, (several of whom are disqualified by law for seats in Parliament,) possess far more power than nine tenths of the members of the House of Commons. I might say this of men who seemed, from their fortunes, their weight in their country, and their talents, to be persons of figure there,--and persons, too, not in opposition to the prevailing party in government. But be they what they will, on a fair canva.s.s of the several prevalent Parliamentary interests in Ireland, I cannot, out of the three hundred members of whom the Irish Parliament is composed, discover that above three, or at the utmost four, Catholics would be returned to the House of Commons. But suppose they should amount to thirty, that is, to a tenth part, (a thing I hold impossible for a long series of years, and never very likely to happen,) what is this to those who are to balance them in the one House, and the clear and settled majority in the other?

For I think it absolutely impossible, that, in the course of many years, above four or five peers should be created of that communion. In fact, the exclusion of them seems to me only to mark jealousy and suspicion, and not to provide security in any way.--But I return to the old ground.

The danger is not there: these are things long since done away. The grand controversy is no longer between you and them.

Forgive this length. My pen has insensibly run on. You are yourself to blame, if you are much fatigued. I congratulate you on the auspicious opening of your session. Surely Great Britain and Ireland ought to join in wreathing a never-fading garland for the head of Grattan. Adieu, my dear Sir. Good nights to you!--I never can have any.

Yours always most sincerely,

EDMUND BURKE.

Jan. 29th, 1795. Twelve at night.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] William Smith, Esq., to whom this Letter is addressed, was then a member of the Irish Parliament: he is now (1812) one of the Barons of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland.

SECOND LETTER

TO

SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE

ON THE

CATHOLIC QUESTION.

MAY 26, 1795.

My Dear Sir,--If I am not as early as I ought to be in my acknowledgments for your very kind letter, pray do me the justice to attribute my failure to its natural and but too real cause, a want of the most ordinary power of exertion, owing to the impressions made upon an old and infirm const.i.tution by private misfortune and by public calamity. It is true, I make occasional efforts to rouse myself to something better,--but I soon relapse into that state of languor which must be the habit of my body and understanding to the end of my short and cheerless existence in this world.

I am sincerely grateful for your kindness in connecting the interest you take in the sentiments of an old friend with the able part you take in the service of your country. It is an instance, among many, of that happy temper which has always given a character of amenity to your virtues and a good-natured direction to your talents.

Your speech on the Catholic question I read with much satisfaction. It is solid; it is convincing; it is eloquent; and it ought, on the spot, to have produced that effect which its reason, and that contained in the other excellent speeches on the same side of the question, cannot possibly fail (though with less pleasant consequences) to produce hereafter. What a sad thing it is, that the grand instructor, Time, has not yet been able to teach the grand lesson of his own value, and that, in every question of moral and political prudence, it is the choice of the moment which renders the measure serviceable or useless, noxious or salutary!

In the Catholic question I considered only one point: Was it, at the time, and in the circ.u.mstances, a measure which tended to promote the concord of the citizens? I have no difficulty in saying it was,--and as little in saying that the present concord of the citizens was worth buying, at a critical season, by granting a few _capacities_, which probably no one man now living is likely to be served or hurt by. When any man tells _you_ and _me_, that, if these places were left in the discretion of a Protestant crown, and these memberships in the discretion of Protestant electors or patrons, we should have a Popish official system, and a Popish representation, capable of overturning the Establishment, he only insults our understandings. When any man tells this to _Catholics_, he insults their understandings, and he galls their feelings. It is not the question of the places and seats, it is the real hostile disposition and the _pretended_ fears, that leave stings in the minds of the people. I really thought that in the total of the late circ.u.mstances, with regard to persons, to things, to principles, and to measures, was to be found a conjuncture favorable to the introduction and to the perpetuation of a general harmony, producing a general strength, which to that hour Ireland was never so happy as to enjoy. My sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings on that terrible disappointment to the same patience in which I have been obliged to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other great, just, and honorable causes in which I have had some share, and which have given more of dignity than of peace and advantage to a long, laborious life. Though, perhaps, a want of success might be urged as a reason for making me doubt of the justice of the part I have taken, yet, until I have other lights than one side of the debate has furnished me, I must see things, and feel them too, as I see and feel them. I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendency, as they affect Ireland,--or of Indianism, as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia,--or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil. But it readily combines with the others, and flows from them. Whatever breeds discontent at this time will produce that great master-mischief most infallibly. Whatever tends to persuade the people that the _few_, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of opinion that their interest is not compatible with that of the _many_, is a great point gained to Jacobinism. Whatever tends to irritate the talents of a country, which have at all times, and at these particularly, a mighty influence on the public mind, is of infinite service to that formidable cause. Unless where Heaven has mingled uncommon ingredients of virtue in the composition,--_quos meliore luto finxit praecordia t.i.tan,_--talents naturally gravitate to Jacobinism. Whatever ill-humors are afloat in the state, they will be sure to discharge themselves in a mingled torrent in the _Cloaca Maxima_ of Jacobinism. Therefore people ought well to look about them. First, the physicians are to take care that they do nothing to irritate this epidemical distemper. It is a foolish thing to have the better of the patient in a dispute. The complaint or its cause ought to be removed, and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigor. They ought to be the _ultima_, not the _prima_, not the _tota_ ratio of a wise government. G.o.d forbid, that, on a worthy occasion, authority should want the means of force, or the disposition to use it! But where a prudent and enlarged policy does not precede it, and attend it too, where the hearts of the better sort of people do not go with the hands of the soldiery, you may call your Const.i.tution what you will, in effect it will consist of three parts, (orders, if you please,) cavalry, infantry, and artillery,--and of nothing else or better. I agree with you in your dislike of the discourses in Francis Street: but I like as little some of those in College Green. I am even less pleased with the temper that predominated in the latter, as better things might have been expected in the regular family mansion of public discretion than, in a new and hasty a.s.sembly of unexperienced men, congregated under circ.u.mstances of no small irritation. After people have taken your tests, prescribed by yourselves as proofs of their allegiance, to be marked as enemies, traitors, or at best as suspected and dangerous persons, and that they are not to be believed on their oaths, we are not to be surprised, if they fall into a pa.s.sion, and talk as men in a pa.s.sion do, intemperately and idly.

The worst of the matter is this: you are partly leading, partly driving into Jacobinism that description of your people whose religious principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an invincible dike against that inundation. This you have a thousand mattocks and pickaxes lifted up to demolish. You make a sad story of the Pope. _O seri studiorum_! It will not be difficult to get many called Catholics to laugh at this fundamental part of their religion. Never doubt it. You have succeeded in part, and you may succeed completely.

But in the present state of men's minds and affairs, do not flatter yourselves that they will piously look to the head of our Church in the place of that Pope whom you make them forswear, and out of all reverence to whom you bully and rail and buffoon them. Perhaps you may succeed in the same manner with all the other tenets of doctrine and usages of discipline amongst the Catholics; but what security have you, that, in the temper and on the principles on which they have made this change, they will stop at the exact sticking-places you have marked in _your_ articles? You have no security for anything, but that they will become what are called _Franco-Jacobins_, and reject the whole together. No converts now will be made in a considerable number from one of our sects to the other upon a really religious principle. Controversy moves in another direction.

Next to religion, _property_ is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the Jacobins all the a.s.sistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext, (though Protestants might suppose it just _possible_ for men to like good places and snug boroughs for their own merits,) but that their real view is, to strip Protestants of their property To my certain knowledge, till those Jacobin lectures were opened in the House of Commons, they never dreamt of any such thing; but now the great professors may stimulate them to inquire (on the new principles) into the foundation of that property, and of all property. If you treat men as robbers, why, robbers, sooner or later, they will become.

A third point of Jacobin attack is on _old traditionary const.i.tutions_.

You are apprehensive for yours, which leans from its perpendicular, and does not stand firm on its theory. I like Parliamentary reforms as little as any man who has boroughs to sell for money, or for peerages in Ireland. But it pa.s.ses my comprehension, in what manner it is that men can be reconciled to the _practical_ merits of a const.i.tution, the theory of which is in litigation, by being _practically_ excluded from any of its advantages. Let us put ourselves in the place of these people, and try an experiment of the effects of such a procedure on our own minds. Unquestionably, we should be perfectly satisfied, when we were told that Houses of Parliament, instead of being places of refuge for popular liberty, were citadels for keeping us in order as a conquered people. These things play the Jacobin game to a nicety.

Indeed, my dear Sir, there is not a single particular in the Francis-Street declamations, which has not, to your and to my certain knowledge, been taught by the jealous ascendants, sometimes by doctrine, sometimes by example, always by provocation. Remember the whole of 1781 and 1782, in Parliament and out of Parliament; at this very day, and in the worst acts and designs, observe the tenor of the objections with which the College-Green orators of the ascendency reproach the Catholics. You have observed, no doubt, how much they rely on the affair of Jackson. Is it not pleasant to hear Catholics reproached for a supposed connection--with whom?--with Protestant clergymen! with Protestant gentlemen! with Mr. Jackson! with Mr. Rowan, &c, &c.! But _egomet mi ignosco_. Conspiracies and treasons are privileged pleasures, not to be profaned by the impure and unhallowed touch of Papists.

Indeed, all this will do, perhaps, well enough, with detachments of dismounted cavalry and fencibles from England. But let us not say to Catholics, by way of _argument_, that they are to be kept in a degraded state, because some of them are no better than many of us Protestants.

The thing I most disliked in some of their speeches (those, I mean, of the Catholics) was what is called the spirit of liberality, so much and so diligently taught by the ascendants, by which they are made to abandon their own particular interests, and to merge them in the general discontents of the country. It gave me no pleasure to hear of the dissolution of the committee. There were in it a majority, to my knowledge, of very sober, well-intentioned men; and there were none in it but such who, if not continually goaded and irritated, might be made useful to the tranquillity of the country. It is right always to have a few of every description, through whom you may quietly operate on the many, both for the interests of the description, and for the general interest.

Excuse me, my dear friend, if I have a little tried your patience. You have brought this trouble on yourself, by your thinking of a man forgot, and who has no objection to be forgot, by the world. These things we discussed together four or five and thirty years ago. We were then, and at bottom ever since, of the same opinion on the justice and policy of the whole and of every part of the penal system. You and I, and everybody, must now and then ply and bend to the occasion, and take what can be got. But very sure I am, that, whilst there remains in the law any principle whatever which can furnish to certain politicians an excuse for raising an opinion of their own importance, as necessary to keep their fellow-subjects in order, the obnoxious people will be fretted, hara.s.sed, insulted, provoked to discontent and disorder, and practically excluded from the partial advantages from which the letter of the law does not exclude them.

Adieu! my dear Sir,

And believe me very truly yours,

EDMUND BURKE.

BEACONSFIELD, May 26, 1795.

A

LETTER

TO

RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.,

ON

PROTESTANT ASCENDENCY IN IRELAND.